what is most remarkable about Kim II Sung's ascent to the position of absolute power which he soon enjoyed in North Korea, and which Kim Jong II has in- herited by dynastic succession, is that there was nothing about his lineage or early career that marked him for such a future when he turned up in Pyongyang in 1945. As Dae-Sook Suh, a Korean- American historian of North Korea and biographer of Kim II Sung, observes, "Contrary to the efforts to build Kim's image as a person coming from a long revolutionary tradition and dedicated parents, his image may be more resplen- dent if he is described as he was: 'a dragon from an ordinary well,' so to speak. At least that would be closer to the truth." In North Korea, however, the truth has never been a matter of fact so much as an expression of the Kims' whim- father and son. The great preponder- ance of this so-called truth is a confec- tion of outright lies-not merely false but, more perniciously, a form of unre- ality, imposed with such relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed from any alternative sources of information that it has become their only realiÌ)T. A North Korean who does not believe the state's every claim is left with the void of dumb disbelie for it is impossible in Kim II Sung Nation- as the North is sometimes described in its own proclamations-to find any- thing else to believe in. "The people are my god," Kim II Sung said, but it is be- fore his towering statues that the people bow down and weep, his name that they must not take in vain, and his teachings that they must live by-even now-lest they be destroyed. Kim II Sung's formal schooling ended in the eighth grade. Mter that, he lived in a realm of extremiì)r, made up in equal measures of violence and Marxist- Leninist indoctrination, and he was convinced that with the right mix of these measures one could make one's world as one wanted it to be. It was crush or be crushed. As he consolidated his control of the ruling Korean Work- ers Party in the late nineteen-forties, he set about lobbying his patron, Stalin, who had by then withdrawn Soviet forces from Korea, to consent to his talung over South Korea as well. Sta- lin urged Kim to be patient, but even- tually gave him the nod. No sooner did the North begin to pour its army into the sleeping South, shortly before dawn on June 25, 1950, than Kim II Sung proclaimed that the opposite had happened: America and its South Korean puppets had invaded, necessi- tating defensive action. Or, as the Party History Institute of the Central Com- mittee put it, "Comrade Kim II Sung, the ever-victorious iron -willed brilliant commander, military strategic genius," went on the radio and called upon the Korean people "to rise as one in the sa- cred struggle for wiping out the U.S. imperialist armed invaders and their " stooges. The North overran the South until America mustered a United Nations mandate to repel the aggression and drove the People's Army back, overrun- ning the North all the way to the Chi- nese frontier, at which point Mao sent a million "volunteers" into the fight, and Stalin dispatched his air force and told Kim, who was ready to give up and sue for peace, to keep fighting. Three years and as many as three million war deaths later, Korea was right where it began: "3:. ':.:."'::.. .. .. <>.......: ::",': ...r ,rfl... ,., l /' @þt.J:Þ r : . : ;:; Ú":i. . :;;=>>'X.. ':;:!-.'": . . "i;; =m:. * . :* \ k ::\t ii ;;' ;;';;;J:::; " '."',<,. ,,: .Ä ::::::'.'::'.:.).:::;.:;. split along the thirty-eighth parallel. A cease-fire was signed, and a two-and-a- half-mile-wide demilitarized zone was carved across the peninsula along the line of partition. But there was no for- mal peace treaty. The Korean War had no winner, and fifty years later it is still not over. Kim II Sung declared victory none- theless, and boasted of "inflicting an ignominious defeat on U.S. imperial- ism and its running dogs." That was the line: North Korea had smashed the for- eign invaders, killing three hundred and ninety-seven thousand American troops in the war (the actual number was thirty- six thousand), and, what was more, it had done so entirely on its own, "under the correct leadership." 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